There is an assumption that certain college degrees are more helpful than others when it comes to preparing for, learning, or succeeding at information technology (IT) careers.

If you believe this to be true then you may also be of the mindset that a Computer Science (BSc.) degree is more valuable than a Liberal Arts (BA) degree!

Surprisingly, there may be some evidence supporting this assumption. For example, it has been noted recently that engineering and computer science college graduates are more employable and better paid than liberal arts college graduates.

With the ever-increasing focus on setting up an online presence or the increasing competitiveness of online businesses, there is a need for web data analysts who can help web-based business succeed or thrive online.

A web data analyst researches the activities of users as they interact with a website, identifies the measures critical to the survival of the web business and recommends actions in the form of web analytics reports for web managers, online marketing teams or business owners.

Data Analysts have the opportunity to work in several different domains or sectors, for example as banking data analysts, retail data analysts, telecommunications data analysts and as marketing data analysts.

The marketing data analyst role is one of the more common ones and a marketing analyst may be found analyzing databases of prospects, leads and customers for the marketing department.

In this post, we will take a peak into the day of a marketing data analyst…

Many database professionals have a hard time writing complex, complicated or advanced SQL queries for the following reasons.

In a healthcare database project that I consulted on, I had to write fairly complicated and efficient SQL queries for physicians at several practices because of their specialized reporting requirements.

The real problem was not the complexity of the physicians database but it’s poor suitability to the physicians reporting needs.

Microsoft Excel is commonly used for data analysis because it’s part of the popular Microsoft Office Suite and it even comes pre-installed on some computers!

Unlike statistical analysis packages like, SAS and SPSS, Excel is relatively inexpensive and widely accessible to small businesses and mid-sized businesses in a variety of industries including healthcare, finance, sales and marketing etc.

Microsoft Excel is used in organizing and analyzing data, performing complex calculations as well as creating graphical displays.